Well I'm about to find out because I'm going to the lab to get my blood drawn then I'm going to eat 100 eggs in seven days. I'm gonna get more blood drawn, I'm going to compare the results and I'm gonna share them with you. Hello Health Champions this is a very detailed cholesterol analysis of before and after I ate a hundred eggs in seven days and I know the number one question on everyone's lips right now is did the cholesterol go up but if you have that question that is the absolute wrong question and if you clicked on this video just to find that out I absolutely guarantee that you will completely miss the point of this video so please don't skip ahead I'm going to talk about eighty percent about how cholesterol works and how they report it because if you don't have those Basics then what happened to me will be completely and totally irrelevant but if you stick with it you're going to learn some things that could save your life what we want to look at is the big picture and the balance between some key markers so I'm going to designate with arrows if something stayed the same if it got better or if it got worse so my total cholesterol went from 207 to 277.
so that is about the same and now you're just saying hey this guy is totally crazy 207 is not the same as 277 and yes I can see that the number changed but what I'm talking about is the risk factor the total risk factor and we're going to talk a lot about that my LDL went from 1 36 to 201 and that is also about the same because by themselves those markers don't mean a whole lot my triglycerides stayed about the same both the number and the risk factor my HDL went up a good bit so that's a little bit of an improvement more isn't always better once you get up to 90 or 100 then it can be high for the wrong reasons but if you're in the 50 60 70 range then more is better also my TSH went up which has to do with thyroid function and a slow thyroid can reduce your ability to process and metabolize cholesterol and then we're going to talk about the size of the LDL particles and here's something that got a little bit worse designated by a red arrow but the question is how much worse did it get so if you stay with me you're going to grasp this picture and I don't want anyone ever to get on a damaging medication for the wrong reasons if you're going to start something you need to know why and you need to understand at least most of these markers and what they mean and how they relate also we need of course a few disclaimers my results may not be typical don't compare your results to mine but rather understand the mechanisms that I'm talking about this is a study called n of 1 meaning the sample size is one person so statistically that means very very little and results are also going to depend on genetics and your overall metabolic health and finally this study is only seven days so in that time period you're not going to see a lot of long-term changes and why was it so short well you try eating 15 eggs a day and seven days are going to seem like a pretty long time and we also want to understand that results can be skewed by events and complications that happen so if on day four you run into some yellow jackets or three of them and you're highly sensitive that can create an inflammatory Cascade that can also skew the results so I don't know if this influenced it but we have to keep that things like that in the back of our mind and we also need to understand the concept of margin of error that if something just changes is a couple of points it really doesn't mean anything so in this case this is the same test page 1 and Page Three it is the same blood draw it was six vials taken from the same vein at the same time on 10 12 and yet when they send it to two different departments one it to evaluate the NMR and want to do the regular lipid profile we get two different results so for this test on 10 12 there's a four percent discrepancy in the cholesterol that they measured and when they checked the triglycerides there was even a 16 margin of error and this is something they measure from the same blood sample and then the marker that most people are the most concerned with is the LDL cholesterol and if you notice in parentheses here it says calculated that means they don't actually measure LDL cholesterol well most of the time because it's very expensive most of the time they're going to calculate it based on total cholesterol HDL and triglycerides and they have a very complicated formula but if there's an error or margin of these numbers then you're also going to have a margin of error on LDL so in this particular case there was an eight percent error in the LDL and then eight days later when I did it again I'm not going to give you all those numbers but we had four percent on the total we had one and a half percent error on the triglycerides and we had a four percent error on the LDL so all of this is just to say that don't look at too much at the nitty-gritty if one marker changes it doesn't really mean a whole lot if eight markers change then we want to see are they moving in the same direction do we see a trend do we understand how these work together and if you came here to find out what happens if you eat 100 eggs in seven days then first we have to understand what is supposed to be a healthy cholesterol and what is really a healthy cholesterol so first of all here is what's supposed to be this is what we've been told that there's different levels of cholesterol that range from dangerous to at risk to what's called heart healthy and in the general model lower cholesterol is always healthier but we're going to question that very very strongly so they say a total cholesterol should be less than 200 you're at risk between 200 and 239 and over 240 it is dangerous it is in the red zone it's like you're walking a heart attack you could blow up at any time your LDL they say should be less than 100 and if you saw on my test it was 200 and I'm not particularly concerned and maybe I'm crazy or maybe I know this a little bit better than some at risk is 100 to 130 and anything over 130 is dangerous and the third marker often mentioned is triglycerides and they want that under 150 you're at risk between 150 and 199 and you're in a danger zone over 200 and keep in mind mine are in the 50s and 60s but with people who are truly at risk these numbers for triglycerides can get into 500 800 a thousand and then when they quote these numbers they often say that don't blame yourself because there's a lot of people with high cholesterol but don't worry because we have medications that can get you from the danger zone into the heart healthy zone but what if none of that is true what is if they got it completely wrong and maybe instead of blaming yourself you should celebrate your higher cholesterol now please please keep in mind I'm not saying that higher is always better you could be healthy with a high or a low cholesterol you could be sick with a high or a low cholesterol but let's start understand how this works let's take a look at what Nature has to say about it it's the leading science journal in the world and here's a study where they looked at the total cholesterol relationship to all cause mortality meaning they don't care what they died from they just did a study and they saw how many people died and what were their cholesterol 10 years earlier so this is what's called a prospective cohort that means they measure the results first and then they look at the results later so they have very little influence when they measure it they don't know who is going to end up doing what so they did 12. 8 million people and this was basically everyone in Korea every adult in Korea that came through their Health Care system that recorded everybody for a period of time between 2001 and 2004 and then 10 years later they followed up and they basically kept it really simple they just saw how many people died and what were their cholesterol 10 years earlier so 600 000 people died which is kind of normal across the population five percent of people died in 10 years and then this was published in 2019 so it's relatively recent now let me break this down and make it simple for you this graph shows the hazard ratio the risk of dying with a baseline of one so if you get up to two that means you doubled your risk of death and if we look at this from the highest level of cholesterol where you have cholesterol of 300 we see that that increased the risk by 30 percent whereas a very low cholesterol of 110 120 increased your risk by 230 percent so a low cholesterol is eight times more dangerous than a high cholesterol and I've had patients walk into the clinic with a cholesterol of 115 who were on a Statin medication for many many years and when I asked them why are you on a Statin they said well the doctors think it's the best just in case so they're taking a toxic medication that interferes with the liver and get it down to a level where the risk of death is eight times higher just from the cholesterol not the medication itself and now let's superimpose that color scale from the previous slide where the green zone is lower in the mainstream in the current model less cholesterol is always better they say but when we see how the so-called safe Zone has the highest risk of all cause death we got to start questioning that right and what they call the danger zone over 240 anything over 200 is at risk or in danger and that is where the curve is the lowest that's the almost flat portion of the curve where the lowest risk is what they call the danger zone and if we blow up that portion of the graph a little bit you can see that the curve is almost flat you're going to increase your risk by two to three percent uh between 200 and 250. so that's kind of the ideal not counting any other factors not counting metabolic syndrome or anything else but 200 to 250 would be the safest range to be in we can also see that one 85 is about the same risk as 265 or 170 is about the same risk as 280.
but why is it then that there are all these other studies you ask that say for years that it's undoubtable it's unquestionable that lower cholesterol is healthier we have to understand who pays for those studies and how are they conducted so yes they conform to very strict standards they're called double-blind Placebo control and all that good stuff but whoever pays for the study owns the study and if they don't get the results that they were looking for they're not going to publish that study why would you pay money and then get bad results and then tell everybody the bad results it just doesn't work like that so 9 out of 10 studies never get published and the ones that do get published they're not like super clear it's like if you stand back far enough and you squint a little bit and you look at it sideways then you could see that it's a little better like a couple of percent Improvement here and there there is nothing really clear and then if you do enough of those studies then you're going to see a pattern eventually but remember ninety percent were never published now this single graph here is both genders and all ages so if we go and we look at the little bit older people 75 and up and we look at men and women on the same graph uh now we see that that curve flattens out even more so even at a cholesterol of 300 we're seeing like an eight to ten percent increased risk and part of this might be that higher cholesterol is very protective for the brain that when people get older they have much lower levels of dementia and neurological diseases if their cholesterol is a bit higher but now it gets really good so we're going to come back to this graph we talked about we're going to add a little bit to it and look at it a little bit differently so if we measure insulin which I always do and 99. 9 percent of the time it's never done then we find a reference range of 2. 6 to 25 essentially so a normal range is two to five 25 is called type 2 diabetes it is called metabolic syndrome it is called severe metabolic disease and mine if you notice was 2.
9 that's typical for me then if we look at another marker called triglycerides the normal range is 0 to 149 mine was 57 and if you look at what's normal is considered under 150 but mild to moderate is up to 500 that is an absolutely astounding number no one should ever ever be close to that range and severe is considered 500 to a thousand so here's the point that this curve only measures total cholesterol so it includes a lot of people with metabolic disease and type 2 diabetes and these diabetics are going to be mostly on the high end because diabetics and people with metabolic disease are not going to have super low triglycerides and super low cholesterol so a healthy thing is to have high total cholesterol but low for the other metabolic markers but this curve like I said is going to include a lot of people with type 2 diabetes and those are the people who are sick those are the people driving this curb up so I would make a very strong case for the fact that if we control if we actually didn't just measure total cholesterol but we also ask who is a diabetic and we took those people out of that curve I I am convinced that the curve would be virtually flat and I don't think a cholesterol of a thousand is necessarily good and I don't know where it starts getting dangerous but I know it is much much higher than 300. I bet you've heard a million times that LDL is the bad cholesterol well that's not how it works because the body makes LDL cholesterol and your body wouldn't make something bad trust me however if this LDL gets damaged by inflammation then it shrinks if we have a lot of sugar it causes glycation if we have a lot of oxidative stress like kind of rusting or inflammation all those things shrink and damage the LDL particle and that is the bad thing not the LDL particle in itself so in this test called an NMR they actually measure and count the LDL particles and they measure their size so they want the total number to be less than a thousand and I went from 1491 to 1970. so by official standards my numbers were Sky High but I'm not concerned because if these are large and fluffy and undamaged that represents no risk so what really matters is how many of the total particles have been damaged and shrunk and are now small the body makes nice fluffy big LDL and the Damage that is harmful shrinks the LDL so how many of the LDL are small well the reference says less than 500 should be small I went from 111 to 423 so I'm well below that number and if we calculate a percentage the reference says that up to 53 percent is okay which I don't agree with that's like an average risk and I started out at 7.
5 which is a very tiny fraction it is basically bulletproof and then I went to 21 so how do we look at this I'm not at all happy about going from excellent to slightly less good but I'm still way ahead of the curve way ahead of the areas where it becomes a risk but trust me I'm not happy at all going from 111 to 423 that is a setback and the other side of that is to measure the size the LDL size should be greater than 20. 5 on average that's the cutoff and perfect ideal number is somewhere around 22 which I had when I started and then I went to 21. 7 so that's not a change I'm at all happy with obviously but the good news is that I'm still nowhere near any significant risk so let's make sense of all of this first of all I do not recommend eating 100 eggs in seven days 15 eggs a day is not a lifestyle it's a stunt and I did it to get people's attention and hopefully be able to educate about how these markers really work and in doing this I try to change as little as possible but as you can understand eating 15 eggs a day you're not going to be able to include all the other stuff you normally eat so I tried to stick with some salads and eating some broccoli and avocado but I had to cut out a lot of the other Meat and Fish and Chicken and so forth so it's far from a balanced diet and when you give your body so much of one type of food very often you can upset your stomach a little bit so four or five days into it my stomach wasn't real happy it was kind of rumbling and and giving me some signs that this wasn't such a great idea so some of what happened I think is more of a shock to the system kind of an overload I also normally just eat once or twice a day whereas now I had to eat basically two to three times to get all of this in and that again can create some metabolic changes but if we get back to summarizing and making some sense of these markers my LDL particle count it increased but again that in itself is not a bad thing when we look at the milligram cholesterol that went up same thing not a bad thing so we're marking this off with with arrows so we have two markers in my opinion based on what we talked about in that Korean study stays the same then my HDL cholesterol measured in milligrams improved significantly that's an arrow up my triglycerides stayed about the same my total cholesterol the number increased but it's not a bad thing in itself so we got four markers that basically did not change risk wise and then the HDL particle count also improved significantly so that's the second Arrow up then we got to the two that I just discussed the particle count for the LDL got worse it increased the risk factor and the LDL size also went to smaller which indicates some inflammation and again when you overload when you shock your system That's Not Unusual I would not actually ascribe that to the cholesterol or anything else in the eggs but rather just doing a stupid stunt of shocking your body like that and there's two more really interesting markers to complete the picture the first one is TSH that went from 1.
5 to 2. 01 and if you notice the range is 0. 45 to 4.
5 again that's way too big a range a 10-fold range is not normal human physiology The Sweet Spot is about 1. 823 and the middle of that is around two and a half that's where you want to be so if it's less than 1. 8 that actually means that you're slightly hypothyroid you're functionally hypothyroid but it's because there is some stress or inflammation that is blunting the pituitary so if the pituitary isn't sensitive to the messages in the body it's not going to produce enough TSH and that that's not significantly below 1.
8 but it's kind of a little bit on the wrong side and getting it up half a point to two really gets it into that optimal range so that's a significant Improvement where it helped my overall metabolism and that's another arrow up and then we have homocysteine which is one of the most important other than metabolic syndrome and Insulin homocysteine is probably the strongest independent risk factor for heart disease it's a metabolite that the liver produces it but then it converts it right back into something healthy which is an amino acid called methionine which then later turns into the body's main antioxidants called glutathione but if you don't have enough B vitamins and methylation factors those are just nutrients that help you can convert so you you build up the homocysteine but if you can convert it then it goes right back into glutathione if you don't have enough or if you don't use those nutrients efficiently your homocysteine builds up and mine isn't super high if you notice the range again is 14 and a half some Labs reported as high as 17.